ENDA Episode 208 → The time when ENDA tells a little secret called: Curve Tool (Part 1)

Have you ever wondered how to replicate flicker?

I know it’s a common question, because I tried the “usual” approach first: take a Grade node and animate the gain values randomly to create the illusion of flicker.

But that method falls apart the moment you’re asked to match a specific flicker pattern, either from the original plate or from a reference the client gives you.

Sure, you could replicate the flicker frame by frame and get a solid result… but you’d burn a lot of work hours on a single task, and deadlines are rarely generous.

Thankfully, the Curve Tool exists.

In the video below, you can see how this native Nuke node helps us extract intensity information from a specific area of the plate.

First, we set a Region of Interest (ROI) and animate the rectangle to follow the surface we want to analyse, in this case, a monitor screen.

Then we choose the Curve Type “Max Luma Pixel” and hit Go! to analyse the brightest pixels across the sequence. The result is a curve containing animation data we can reuse.

Once we paste that data into Colour Constant values, we can immediately see the difference: the Max Luma Pixel curve gives us the feeling of real flicker, while the Min Luma Pixel curve barely changes at all.

Now the real question is…

How do we apply this extracted data to our hypothetical screen replacement?

Well, that will be for a future episode.

The journey continues...